Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

The Power, Movement in Case Maclaim’s Murals

Case Maclaim is the moniker of German artist Andres Von Chrzanowski, a muralist known as a co-founder of the Maclaim Group, a troupe known for using spray paint to combine photorealism and surrealism on public walls. In particular, the artist is known as one to “embrace the power of movement through the universality of hands.”

Case Maclaim is the moniker of German artist Andres Von Chrzanowski, a muralist known as a co-founder of the Maclaim Group, a troupe known for using spray paint to combine photorealism and surrealism on public walls. In particular, the artist is known as one to “embrace the power of movement through the universality of hands.”

A statement explains two of those terms in the context of his art: “‘Power’ and ‘movement’ have individually played key roles in the backbone of his German roots, inspiring him to communicate his strong messages of unity and power by overlaying hands,” it says. “The overlaying ‘movement’ is not just the physical body movement but political movement, generally being left without a particular context in which the viewer is left to visualize the remaining story and/or emotion, relative to their current situations. Having travelled to over 20 countries he has literally left his fingerprints in each, continually leaving bits and pieces of a language understood by all, after all a hand gesture can tell a thousand words.”

This is expressed in close-up shots of kids and adults carrying items held dear and cascaded gestures. See more of what we mean below.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
Italian artist PixelPancho is known for a fascination with robots, yet his massive murals go beyond contemplations on technology and into metaphysical territory. His work, found on walls across the world, offer an interconnected narrative from piece to piece, gradually unfolding the painter's broad examination of what it means to be human.

The London Police

When the first-ever END-to-END festival recently landed in Charlotte, N.C., it added nearly two-dozen murals to the 76-acre Camp North End, which began its existence as a Model T factory and is a now a burgeoning mixed-use site with industrial structures in-tact. Among the artists: The London Police (last featured on HiFructose.com here), Fabian Williams, James Moore (last featured here), Hnin Nie (last featured here), and several others.
The gigantic murals of the Peruvian painter El Decertor run along sidewalks in Lima, on apartment buildings in Baltimore, and on streets and buildings in Venezuela, Morocco, and Mexico, just to name a few. Across each city, the work features consistent motifs of complex, colorful backgrounds made from fractured polygon patterns, with a prominent figure at the mural’s focus. These figures are mostly mystical — they are clearly human, painted with an empathetic realism, but posed with some symbolic gesture or object: metaphors for immigration, agriculture, housing, meditation, colonialism. Occasionally the murals drift into the surrealistic, framing an alternate reality for passersby throughout the city to gaze into, and perhaps recognize some of their own inside.
Juanjo Surace’s expertise in animation and character design comes through the murals he crafts on walls across the globe. His surreal work often confronts themes from our own reality, from death and solitude to technology and consumption. The above work, "The Trip," was painted over 14 days in Vinaròs.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List